ICANN lifer Dan Halloran has added the title of chief data protection officer to his business card.

The long-serving deputy general counsel was named ICANN’s first CDPO on Friday, continuing to report to his current boss, general counsel John Jeffrey.

Privacy is currently the hottest topic in the ICANN community, with considerable debate about how contracted parties might be able to reconcile their ICANN obligations with forthcoming European data protection legislation.

But Halloran’s new role only covers the protection of personal data that ICANN itself handles; it does not appear to give him powers in relation to ongoing discussions about how registries and registrars comply with data privacy regulations.

He will be tasked with overseeing privacy frameworks for data handling and conducting occasional reviews, ICANN said.

ICANN will NOT set a date for the next round of new gTLD applications, despite recent pleas from registry operators.

That’s according to a letter (pdf) from ICANN chair Steve Crocker to the Registries Stakeholder Group published today.

The RySG had asked (pdf) last month for ICANN’s leadership to set a fourth-quarter 2018 deadline for the next application window.

It said that that drawing a line in the sand would allow potential applicants to plan and would prevent current policy-development processes from being abused to delay the next round.

But Crocker says in his letter that it is up to the ICANN community, not its board of directors, to determine if and when a new round should commence. He wrote:

Once the community completes its work, the Board will consider the community’s recommendations to introduce additional new gTLDs. Without the final findings and recommendations from the review and PDP, the Board won’t be able to determine what needs to be done prior to the opening of another application process…

The Registry Stakeholder Group’s letter suggests that by setting a date for the opening of another application process, the Board will provide the community with a target date to work toward. Although the Board setting a date would achieve this, doing so might contravene the multi-stakeholder process that allows for the community to have the necessary discussions to arrive at consensus, and to determine the timing of their own work

It seems this is an instance in which the board does not like the idea of setting policy in a top-down manner.

Crocker said the two remaining gating factors for a next round are the consumer choice and competition review of the first round, which is ongoing, and the GNSO’s New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Policy Development Process (PDP).

The PDP has now been going on for 18 months and yet discussions remain at a very early stage, with hardly any preliminary recommendations being agreed upon.

There’s not even agreement on foundational issues such as whether to carry on dividing the program into discreet application rounds or to start a first-come, first-served process.

The RySG had suggested in its letter that the next window could open after certain threshold issues had been resolved but before all policy work was complete, and that at the very least ICANN staff should get to work on a new version of the Applicant Guidebook while the PDP is still ongoing.

But Crocker again responded that the staff cannot get to work on implementation until the board has considered the community’s final recommendations.

ICANN’s most recent estimates for the opening of the next round would see applications accepted in 2020, eight years after the last round.

The number of people showing up for ICANN’s latest meeting was down compared to previous meetings, just-released statistics show.

The organization reported today that there were 1,353 attendees at the ICANN 59 meeting in Johannesburg last month, down from 1,436 at the comparable Helsinki meeting a year ago.

It was also down from the 2,089 people attending the Copenhagen meeting in March, but that’s to be expected due to the mid-year meeting having a shorter schedule more tightly focused on policy work.

It also seems to be typical for meetings in Africa to get lower attendance than meetings elsewhere in the world, given the relatively low participation at last year’s Marrakech meeting.

But attendance from the local region spiked again. There were 498 Africans there, 36% of the total. By comparison, just 5% of Copenhagen attendees were African.

This tilted the gender balance towards males, with declared female participation down to 31% from 33% in Copenhagen and 32% in Helsinki.

The number of people attending their first ICANN meeting was 33% of the total. That’s much higher than the 20% reported for Copenhagen. About two thirds of the noobs were from Africa.

These numbers are among the thousands of statistics released in the ICANN 59 roundup today, which for the first time included some eye-opening facts about food and drink consumption at the venue, reproduced here.

If these numbers are correct, there was one waiter or member of service staff for every 2.7 meeting attendees, which strikes me as a weirdly balanced ratio.